Dave Whitinger: Inventing Linux News Reporting

Several years ago, when people called Linux a fledgling operating system, I
met Dave Whitinger, founder of Linux Today. Surprisingly, we both lived in
the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We met in a cafe in McKinney, Texas and spent an
afternoon discussing Linux. During the next year, we became friends. He
introduced me to many of the people I know in the Linux community. We ran into
each other at Linux events and spoke on the phone often.

Despite being the creator of what we think of as Linux news, Whitinger spent
the last couple of years out of sight of the community. Dave took an imposed
vacation from the moment-by-moment postings of his popular web site when he
sold Linux Today to Internet.com. In retrospect, his timing looks impeccable.
Soon after the sell, the NASDAQ took a deep plunge. Dave looked like a genius
at financial management as well as web site development. Jupiter media now
owns Internet.com and runs a tight ship. I have to wonder if Dave would have
had the freedom to create his news site had he not started it himself.

Today, he's back and publishing another Linux news site. More competition
exists now than when he was almost all alone in the field. Dave's re-entry
into the community he never really left may be another example of good timing.
Linux continues to gain momentum in every quarter and Whitinger knows that
content is king. He's also adding new kinds of interactive technology to his
site.

Dave's return to the limelight started with his new site, LXer.com. After
some preliminary catching up, he finally agreed to do an interview with me. Out
of the Linux spotlight, he has created web sites such as Dave's Garden, the largest database of plant
listings and images in the world. He admits his passion for Linux, though.
Fortunately, we have him back.

Tom Adelstein: When I first met you in 1999 you had just
started Linux Today. Tell us something about your start up--the
beginnings.

Dave Whitinger: It goes back to about a year before Linux
Today was founded, as I was working for Red Hat in their marketing department.
One of my side projects was to publish an internal web page of Linux-related
news announcements and links to news articles that mentioned Linux. News
articles that mentioned Linux back in 1997 were a huge deal.

After leaving Red Hat in December of 1997, I continued to publish my news
through an email list that was also mirrored on a small web page.

Around August of 1998, Dwight Johnson emailed me and suggested that we
collaborate on a real Linux news web site financed with advertisements from
companies who wanted to target Linux users and developers. Without thinking
much about it, I agreed, and off we went. My little Linux news site got a new
domain name, new code, and a new logo.

Clearly the time was right for a good hourly Linux newswire, as within three
weeks we were sustaining around 30,000 page views per day. Of course, within a
year, we were doing millions of page views and almost half a million readers per
month. It was a fun ride.

TA: We could say you exemplified the success of the
early Linux surge. What did you notice about the first round of IPOs?

DW: I joined the Linux community back in 1995, when I put
away my OS/2 Warp desktop and gave Slackware Linux a try. I knew we had
something special, and felt like it would be "the next big thing" in technology.
I wanted to be a part of the best of the best, so I joined Red Hat in 1997.

I remember walking into Bob Young's office as he was literally giddy with
delight that he had just obtained a million dollars from an investor. I asked
what he had to give in return for the million, and Bob exclaimed: "Only one third of
the company!" I nearly fainted with grief, that such a huge portion of such a
promising and valuable company had been given away for pennies. At that point,
Bob Young didn't know, but many in the Linux community knew, that there was
some very serious money potential in Linux.

The time leading up to Red Hat's offering was fast and furious. Red Hat's
investor portfolio read like a Who's Who of technology. When the IPO finally
came, nobody was really surprised at its smashing success, although the
mainstream press reported it as a real oddity.

It was a unique time that, in many ways, I am glad is finished. That pace
can only be sustained for so long.

TA: How did your business reflect start-up qualities?

DW: We never borrowed or spent much money. What we did was
work with the resources we had and did as good a job with what we had as
possible. I continued to work at my corporate job during the first six months.
We did no paid advertising. It was basically a typical organic-growth-oriented
company that only grew fast because of the incredible demand, and lack of
supply, for our product.

TA: I saw you in New York, right after you sold Linux
Today, but I never got the scoop. Do you want to tell me now what happened?

DW: A variety of companies started approaching us at the end
of the summer (1999) wanting to buy us. Being a father with a new child, I
welcomed the security involved with selling the business and continuing to
operate it, getting a steady paycheck.

We did finally sell to Internet.com, but I didn't stay with the company.
Leaving Linux Today is in my top-three list of largest lifetime regrets.

DW: The timing of the foundation of LXer wasn't based on so
much a surge, as simply agreements expiring.

I had a three-year agreement with Internet.com that I would not start a new
Linux news site. I also felt like I had a commitment to LWN.net that I
wouldn't start anything until 2003 ended.

You know, Linux rocks. I think you and I are the types that are here for
the love of the game (or computer system), not the money, per se. If there is
another financial surge coming, that's fun, and it'll help us get even more work
done. If not, then that's cool, too. I'm here because I have been waiting to
re-enter the Linux community, making the kinds of contributions that I do
best.

TA: What's different about the market now?

DW: I really don't think we're heading back into a big
Linux financial surge. My guess is that the industry around Linux is maturing
and it is becoming a necessary piece of technology with which to conduct
business operations. The Google IPO might re-ignite some activity, but I think
it'll be muted.

Linux continues to make good business sense; in this regard, nothing has
changed. There remains a virtually infinite amount of business possibilities
in this industry.

TA: Dave, LT had some innovative technology that allowed
you to create an hourly newswire for Linux. Please share with us how you
created your site and the kinds of applications you used.

DW: The acronym CMS, for Content Management System, was
basically unheard of at the time, so the only choice was the "roll your own"
approach, and it's just what we did.

PHP wasn't really used much yet at that time, and the language of choice was
Perl. We examined a variety of different Apache-Perl tools and ultimately
settled on mod_perl. To build Linux Today, I actually had to first learn how
to program in Perl. I read a Perl and MySQL tutorial at WebMonkey (I'm pretty
sure it was this one:
webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/backend/databases/tutorials/tutorial1.html).

After studying the tutorial, I created a basic Linux news web site that had
one table for stories and one table for talkbacks. I also wrote a few admin
tools for posting stories into that table, and then wrote two or three scripts
that would show the stories to the visitors. I remember the whole process
taking about three days, from reading the tutorial to launching the site. It
was a busy three days.

Three weeks after launch, I learned about the need for optimization when we
had a big story that was linked from some big sites, including Slashdot. At
that point, I implemented a caching system so that stories could be easily
served without crashing the server each time we had 10,000 visitors in an hour.

Later on, PHP 3 was released, and I rewrote the entire site in PHP and
implemented a much fancier system where users could log in and customize their
own news. Perl is a great language and I still enjoy it, but PHP is the
language of the Web.